Area schools have lost touch with thousands of students
SHUTDOWN: TEA asks districts to log data on children who have not been in contact
At some point in the weeks after the world seemed to stop, two teachers planted a yard sign in front of a small white house on the far west side of Texas City.
“My teachers miss me,” it read, signed by Mr. Myers and Mrs. Reed.
Two dogs, tethered to poles, howled Friday morning as Roosevelt-Wilson Elementary School Principal Wendy Patterson and Assistant Principal Angela Randall knocked on the front door of the same house. No one from the school or district — not even the teachers who had put up the sign weeks before — had heard from the student who lives there since his campus closed in mid-March.
After several minutes, the administrators turned to head back to their cars but stopped when a small boy in a peachcolored T-shirt walked outside barefoot, rubbing his eyes.
Before Friday, he was among thousands of Houstonarea students who have lost contact with their teachers and schools since campuses closed to help slow the spread of the new coronavirus. They and their families have not signed onto virtual learning platforms, turned in or picked up paper work packets, and have not responded to teachers’ and administrator’s calls.
In Lamar Consolidated ISD, for example, about 2,330 students — roughly 7 percent of the district’s population — have not logged onto online lessons or requested paper work since that district shut its doors in mid-March.
Up in Spring ISD, about 5 percent of its elementary stu
dents, 8 percent of middle school students and 2 percent of high school students have not been in contact with the district. About 3 percent of Fort Bend ISD students have not responded to teachers’ messages.
Other districts, including Houston, Alvin and Dickinson ISDs, have not yet collected data on how many of their students, effectively, have gone missing.
The Texas Education Agency on Friday asked districts to begin logging raw numbers and percentages of their students who have not been contacted, as well as those who have been in “infrequent contact.” The agency also asked schools to separate those numbers by race, gender and grade level “to ascertain whether there are disparate impacts that also need to be addressed.”
“School district leadership, including the superintendent, should be aware of the absolute number and percentage of students that are considered uncontactable,” TEA officials wrote. “In addition, they should be developing or adopting best practices to organize and track the efforts used to locate the uncontactable students.”
Checking in
Districts will not be penalized for their missing students, though the state normally funds schools based on their average daily attendance. The TEA said it would waive those attendance requirements, so long as districts could show they are teaching students remotely.
Sheleah Reed, communications director for Aldine ISD, said between 7 and 10 percent of the district’s 67,259 students remain unaccounted for. That is down from about 27 percent in the first days and weeks after schools closed due to COVID-19.
The decrease, Reed said, is due largely to campus efforts, with multiple teachers calling students’ families each week to check on their well-being and access to necessities such as food and the internet. The district has lent out thousands of laptops and mobile internet hot spots, as have most other districts in Greater Houston.
Still, some families may have new phone numbers and did not update their information with their children’s campus, she said. Others may have moved or are leaving children with grandparents while the parents go to work in essential jobs.
“It’s important to recognize that not getting in touch with one child is way too many,” Reed said.
Gulf Coast schools have experienced this before, particularly after hurricanes and floods.
However, the scale of students who are unaccounted for is more widespread than after storms, even ones as devastating as Hurricane Harvey, and the lack of contact has stretched for months rather than weeks, said Andree Osagie, assistant superintendent for secondary education at Lamar Consolidated ISD.
“In that case, we had sections of our community hit by the flood, so we knew certain groups of students in certain subdivisions couldn’t make contact,” Osagie said. “Now, what we are finding in this particular situation is a lot of that moving in with grandma in El Campo or another part of the state.”
When Patterson, Randall and two Galveston County sheriff’s deputies visited an apartment complex near the Texas City Dike, a woman at the leasing office told them the family they were looking for had been evicted weeks ago.
Hit-or-miss visits
Still, Texas City ISD has been relatively lucky. Only 93 students, or 1 percent, in that district are unaccounted for; and in nearby Friendswood ISD, the district lost contact with only two students.
To find the remaining 93 students, more than two dozen Texas City school staff members and sheriff ’s school liaisons fanned out across the district Friday morning to knock on students’ doors.
“What’s really important is knowing where our kids are, making sure that they’re OK during this time of separation, and just putting our eyes on them and seeing them and checking on them,” Interim Superintendent Susan Myers said. “The more we do that now, the better off they’ll be and we’ll be when we return, hopefully, in the fall.”
Patterson already had hand-delivered paper packets to about 50 of her students, but she and her staff had been unable to track down nine of her school’s 628 students. She and Randall rode with two deputies from house to house. No one opened the first door, although the porch light was on, a car was parked in the driveway and colorful stickers lined one of the front windows.
At the second house, the one with the homemade sign out front, the young boy’s older brother eventually came out. He said their mother had been helping to teach the student but he did not know why they had not turned in any assignments. He said he would tell his mother to call the school.
The third stop was among a series of single-story apartments, where tenants cautiously leaned out of their front doors to see why two deputies and two women in teal shirts and masks were knocking on their neighbor’s door. A woman wearing pajamas answered, explaining that she was the grandmother of a Wilson-Roosevelt student.
“Am I in trouble or something?” she asked, glancing nervously at deputies Cipriano Ruiz and Louis Maldonado, who stood about 10 feet away.
“They needed an Uber,” Ruiz told her, gesturing at Patterson and Randall with a laugh.
There was no answer at the fourth and fifth houses.
A little girl answered the door at the sixth, a white house with a toy truck and a pair of pink children’s sandals out front.
“Hi!” Patterson said. “I’m Principal Patterson. Is your mom or dad home?”
About five minutes later, a woman pushed open the glass door. Minutes later it was closed.
“That was her mom,” Patterson said. “She just hasn’t done any of her work, so we did offer her some help if she needed any help getting on the internet or getting the curriculum. She said no, she didn’t.”
Before leaving, Patterson looked at the little girl and told her it was important for her to do her schoolwork, and if she needed any help, her teacher would be there.
“I think we’ll just continue to reach out to them,” she said as she walked to the car.